Christmas Carol

I heard the President quite by accident last night. I was doing something else, cleaning up from dinner after the Washington Redskins trounced the hated Cowboys. The Simpsons were coming up, an all-new episode, when something happened. The Boys had been fooling with the remote control as we watched the game.

I’m old school. Once I turn on the box, I mostly stay right on the channel that comes on. Maybe it is because I am not really watching it, or maybe it is because I lack imagination. That is not true with the Boys. They have a much shorter attention span, or a greater need for stimulation that Clinton Portis ramming the football into the hapless Dallas line cannot completely satisfy.

We were all over the cable spectrum, seeming to spend as much time with the Lord of the Rings Book Two battle for Helm’s Deep as we did with the tamer battle at FedEx Field. I admired the computer animation that created the army of Orcs. It was quite realistic, all those dark helmeted figure surging forward.

Or maybe that the game. Like I said, the kids flip around a lot.

So was the President, who came on the screen when I hit one of the buttons. I’m not sure which one, since I was pushing them pretty much at random.

It was an unusual Sunday night. Normally, after the NFL game is over there is a visit with 60 Minutes to get the weekly civics-light lesson before beginning the long decline into Monday morning. But since the Fox network bought the rights to the football games, it is the Simpsons that who come on, rather than Mike Wallace and Lesley Stahl.

But not tonight. I was surprised to hear an update that claimed the House was embarking on an all-nighter to finish work on the appropriations bills, and I blanched to think what the legislation would look like. They are not at their best at midnight, I thought, and that was when they were likely to contemplate the $40 billion in budget cuts they needed. That and the almost half a trillion dollars to fund Defense, and the wars.

Then I was startled to see the President, live from the Oval Office.

He was giving the fifth of four important policy speeches about the situation in Iraq . The last time the President spoke from his office was when he said we were going in to overthrow Saddam, so I went to the kitchen and got a beer and settled in to listen to what he had to say. The four speeches he had given over the last week had focused on reconstruction, politics and security.

He said things were going pretty well, and that we should continue to move forward. Mistakes had been made, and things were harder than he had expected, but with the successful elections and continued resolution, we would win the war.

I shook my head in agreement. It seemed reasonable, and it was comforting that the President acknowledged that he might have misjudged things in the year after the swift conquest.

I sensed a little frustration that the controversy over monitoring domestic communications and e-mail had overshadowed the spin the Administration wanted us to have as we went into the Holiday .

The Army pumped up troop levels in-country to provide improved security for the elections, and the speeches were intended to focus us on the positive results. So that is why the story from the New York Times about the bugging was the journalistic equivalent of an Improvised Explosive Device. It blew the wheels off the media message, and forced the President back on television to help us stay on-message.

I’m going to stay the course, since I don’t have a realistic choice.

The president used Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to finish the speech. It was an obscure carol that had been written during the Civil War. It talked of travail and despair in the face of troubling news, but ended with an upbeat note. The President looked into the camera when he was done and said:

“God is not dead, nor does he sleep;

The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,

With peace on earth, good will to men.”

I fumbled with the remote to turn the television off. I don’t know what to think about invocations to God about policy decisions. But if it results in better policy, I guess I am all for it.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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